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If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should
by captainbland 29d ago
If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually owning the good in perpetuity.
- ncr100 29d agoYes. "buy" and "purchase" are redefined in the EULA
- epicureanideal 29d agoThey shouldn’t be able to redefine common terms when closer terms like lease or license are available. It’s misleading.
- everyone 29d agoIt's also totally illegal in many countries.. you can write whatever nonsense you want on an eula, but it will be about as useful as toilet paper in court.
- ncr100 28d agoAdditionally e.g. the UK has right-to-repair which may influence this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552588 (from elsewhere in this discussion).
- ncr100 28d agoAgreed - and with AI being able to easily navigate arbitrarily complex and humanly-misleading systems, average humans (without a personal lawyer always on retainer) are at an increasing disadvantage in society.
- loconut 29d agoI wonder if said EULA can also help me make sense of my diceware password.
- ncr100 28d agoHere is the EULA: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/terms-of-service/ https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/terms-of-service/ After reviewing it - idk? It's too complex for me to understand .. in my naivety!
- ahartmetz 29d agoIn which case I redefine "pay" as "torrent it with a very respectable upload ratio".
- Boxxed 29d agoI even take issue with "Purchase license". Shouldn't it be "Lease License"? Purchase implies that it can't be revoked, no?
- singpolyma3 29d agoNah. Licenses can be revoked. When I buy a hunting license I don't get it forever
- hobonation 29d ago[dead]
- embedding-shape 29d agoBut licenses in general you don't just "buy", you "earn" them somehow, then also usually you pay a price for it too, but it's typically about knowing about some rules and/or norms.
- jdiff 29d agoSoftware licenses are bought all the time.
- embedding-shape 29d agoSure, but that's a very different type of license compared to a hunting license, driver license or similar stuff, you know, the context.
- pc86 29d agoAnd the initial comment that started this was that "Purchase license" in reference to this... software license... wasn't clear. Arguing about whether you buy a hunting license or that it's not a perfect analogy seems pedantic and irrelevant.
- Waterluvian 29d agoThis is the only regulation I feel is reasonable. When it comes to luxury goods like video games, it doesn’t make sense to dictate how the product is offered. But by all means insist they’re clear with what the transaction type is. I can imagine the natural competitive wedge where GOG can say “Buy Game” but Steam has to say “Lease Game” on their buttons.
- Zambyte 29d agoThis would be case-by-case in Steam. There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product). Other games on Steam do not. I think it would highlight the differences between publishers / studios more than store fronts.
- chrisjj 29d ago> There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product). Far from it. E.g. excludes resale.
- Zambyte 29d agoFor digital products, that would mean copyright privileges. Else there is no definition of "buy" that applies to GOG sales either.
- Topology1 29d agoThis is actually state law in CA. People reported Sony to California's Attorney General, who basically said they weren't going to do anything about it. Unfortunately the law is only as useful as its enforcement.
- dataflow 29d agoWhat was their rationale for doing nothing?
- benjiro29 29d agoWhat was their rationale for doing nothing? Carrot: Free vacations? Merch? Benefits ... Stick: Scared because taking actions against the Buy (aka you own nothing) is paramount to going in a fight with a entire industry.
- b112 29d agoClass action civil case should still be doable? And 100k small claims court cases would hurt.
- skrellm 29d ago> Class action civil case should still be doable? Nope, because there's a stance in EULA's footnote (with extremely small letters) that you give up your rights to class action civil case.
- b112 29d agoSo you've verified this? In this specific case? Or are you just being a wise guy. Regardless, these sorts of things have been fought before, over and over. Often, courts don't care about an EULA when wrongful action has been taken. The jurisdiction matters too, of course.
- 29d ago
- bsimpson 29d agoThen the button becomes License and everyone knows that's the one you click to buy. As much as I empathize with (and even support) the reasoning, I wonder if it would have a tangible effect. Is there anyone who was gonna click "buy" but not "license" (presuming they relabel the button and everything else is the same)?
- Avicebron 29d agoIt should in a functioning system, people who see lease or license on a game may be more hesitant to buy it and might pick a game who differentiates itself by marketing itself as being a permanent purchase.
- californical 29d agoI think it depends. If they are also required to allow 3rd party stores, and one of the third parties has a “buy” button while the others have “lease (lifetime)” buttons, it might sway a decent number of people. Same thing with consoles, if one has “buy” and the other “lease”, then it might not convert everyone but could it take 5% of sales? 10%? 20%??
- bsimpson 29d agoThat's assuming there's an alternative. Yes, the language should be clear and precise. Also, if the whole industry string-replaces "lease" for "buy," I doubt the effect will be much.
- ryandrake 29d agoI don't think the general public is engaged enough to understand the difference between "license" and "buy". They will look at the button and think "This is what I click to get it" and don't understand that they are just temporarily renting the thing. To most people, "license" is a noun: something you carry in your pocket to drive. The word is already overused by media vendors to confuse people.
- inigyou 29d ago
- braiamp 29d ago[dead]
- simpaticoder 29d agoIt's a non-transferable lease that can be canceled at any time by the issuer. The real problem is that most of society still thinks of games as a piece of physical media that you combine with a player that allows you to play the game. In that world you have a liscense to the software, and a physical token which is transferable and therefore valuable. I'd argue that we need to decouple transferability and cancel ability from physical media. If this were to happen then the word "Buy" makes sense precisely the same way it used to with physical media. Of course more provision needs to be provided for live service games regarding cancel ability.
- stetrain 29d agoYes, some people are trying to achieve this by arguing that physical media should stick around forever. I think the real solution is providing the same protections and rights for digital purchases as we had with physical media. That would be a real win for consumers since we get the advantages of digital media with the ownership and transference rights of physical media. Of course this would be a great inconvenience to those who wish to charge the same price for a temporary revocable license to the content, and they have deep lobbying pockets to fight against it.
- Kinrany 29d agoAs long as we're in copyright world, it ought to be structured as three separate parties: 1. Licensor, the company who makes the game. 2. Licensee, the person buying a digital copy of the game. 3. Safekeeper, Steam or another platform that stores the digital copy on behalf of Licensee. Similar to how depositories store securities and guarantee that they can be neither lost nor duplicated. For a separate fee perhaps.
- inigyou 29d agoGood luck. SKG got an official response from the EU that was basically "copyright law is a sacred cow, we can't change it"
- AgingGamer 29d agoVery much matching my thinking on the argument the plaintiffs are making. Sony just needs to change the labels on a few buttons. But for some reason they don't want to and are willing to go to court on the matter. As you say, using the word "Buy" is stronger than "License", but it seems a strange hill to die upon.
- dfxm12 29d agoWe won't know without A/B testing, but I suspect aesthetics mean nothing here and, for example, someone isn't going to turn down playing GTA VI if the only button between them and the game says "purchase license" as opposed to "buy". I'd rather have my rights as a consumer protected or get something tangible for giving them up (like cheaper games) than introduce even more legalese into online shops.
- numpad0 29d agoSomeone in past threads mentioned that many digital sales website in fact no longer use "buy" anymore, and instead deniably implicate purchases by such expressions as "Add to Cart", "Proceed to Checkout", and "Pay".
- inigyou 29d agoWonder if you could have those buttons and not give the user anything at the end, since you never said they were buying anything, only giving you money.
- hellcow 29d agoYes, all this talk about the language used still leads us to the same frustrating outcome: customer pays for something, and at some unspecified point in the future that same thing is taken away from them. I don't care if 6 years earlier I clicked a button that said Pay vs Buy, I care that my purchase is being removed due to some backroom licensing issue.
- motbus3 29d agoI would have spent much less money if I knew they could revoke the license at their own discretion
- yawnxyz 29d agothis would wreck a lot of the marketing efforts and probably be bad for their bottom line in the long run I'm surprised the Sony team isn't freaked out about this
- inigyou 29d agoThis is the law in some places. Companies solved the problem by not using any buying verbs at all. The button you click to not-buy the app says "$3.99" or "Add to cart". When you go to the cart the next step is "Pay now" or "Continue to checkout".
- 13415 29d agoI agree but that's not even enough. If you only lease the game, they will also need to tell you exactly for how long you lease it. Any reasonable person would have an issue with a lease for an indefinite time period that can be canceled at any time without refund, it doesn't sound acceptable at all.
- thayne 29d agoAnd if you buy a license, it should either have a fixed term that is clearly communicated, or should be forever, and transferrable, not "untile we decide we don't want you to have it anymore".
- dzonga 29d agopeople tend to have short memories though. late 90s and early 00s - even while growing up in the 3rd world - you bought or pirated a software license. so we've never really purchased or bought software.